A simple and effective way to grow your online readership is to be generally helpful in all that you do. If you continually send valuable content to your readers, you can be sure that they'll engage in content that help them to be better, even if it is marginally in the area of your expertise. Some examples are investment companies giving - guess what - investment advice, or marketing agencies like yours truly - doing the unthinkable - telling people how to do great marketing. The point is, the more education you offer through your content, the further you move a prospect along the buyer continuum and into your sales pipe. Let's explore this:

Show Your Cards - offering education boosts your credibility

This act of kindness will create a loyal following within your audience, and if you're in the service industry, then bonus to you, as you begin to affect how others serve their clients and create an attachment to the quality of your standards. If you're really good at what you do, you may begin to form a dependency on your materials as others follow your lead in your industry.

At this point, you have regular subscribers to your content and most likely they've moved comfortably into your database. If you have a killer marketing department, they'll be segmenting your leads by either product, location, subscriptions, etc. and you can target them with a unique offering that makes you look really good.

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Education enhances your thought leadership and grows your content repository

A further benefit of your new friendly content giving ways is the advent of thought leadership. Information is an ever flowing and an even increasing wide river, as more and more people turn to Online searches for the answers to their everyday problems. If you want to captivate sub - audience in your industry, education is the best tool. Based on the content you provide, you will begin to convert leads of different qualification. For instance, if you share basic or intermediate quality content, you may find more students are following your work and you're setting yourself up as a prime candidate for future job applicants.

On the other end, if you'd like to grow readership with customers or highly qualified readers indoor industry, all you need to do is tweak the content offering to suit their pain points and information gaps. Advanced content, product descriptions, etc. all work towards this goal. A great bonus benefit is the increase in organic leads that you'll receive from your social media networks, especially if you share the right content, to the right channel, at the right time.